HELLO AGAIN, SONG.

I'm not a big Arlo Guthrie fan. I don't have any of his records, but he doesn't bug me. He was counter culture enough in his day and, shit, his dad was Woody Guthrie. I haven't heard full albums of his in years. But I was checking up on Tibbles's posts over at Time Goes By, because it's been a while. His name is Peter Tibbles, but he has too perfect of a last name to not use it by itself. Tibbles. Sounds like a character in a movie. (Hope you don't mind Peter!) Tibbles has tastes that intersect mine a lot, but he gets into stuff that's way off my radar. Like Guthrie's "Coming Into Los Angeles", a song about flying into L.A. with a bunch of weed. I knew the song, but it's been years since I've heard it. What the fuck. Click.

Wow. My ear has changed in the last few decades. When I first heard the song, in my teens, smuggling weed into L.A. seemed exotic, dangerous. Nowadays, you can buy it in a store. But that's not the big difference, When I heard it today I was struck by the awesome guitar work. It's just too good, and there's more than one expert picker playing simultaneously. How many, I'm not sure. But a look at Wikipedia tells me that there were no fewer than four that played on the LP that contains this song. Check this: Ry Cooder. James Burton. Clarence White. Gene Parsons. Man, any pair of those names would be enough. Make it three and you have a country rock Blue Öyster Cult going on.

~ NOTE: ALL MEDIA IS HOSTED BY THE BLOGS & SITES NAMED BELOW ~

Listen:
Arlo Guthrie - Coming into Los Angeles mp3 at Time Goes By

THIS HIPPIE GETS A PASS

Fifty years ago on Thanksgiving day, Arlo Guthrie arrived at Alice's Restaurant and an incident happened that would change his fate and be immortalized in a song he wrote and released a year or two later. Since it's been years since I've listened to it in its entirety, today I bit. I forgot what an entertaining song it is. It's actually more like a monologue with guitar, and not really about the restaurant, but about the butterfly effect of littering and how that got him out of the draft. It's eighteen minutes long, and entertaining enough that it was stretched out for a feature length movie. 

~ NOTE: ALL MEDIA IS HOSTED BY THE BLOGS & SITES NAMED BELOW ~

Listen:
Arlo Guthrie - Alice's Restaurant mp3 at Svana (?)
Visit:
50 things about Arlo Guthrie’s ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ on its 50th anniversary at Boston Globe